"They called him trash and joked about ... no one bidding on him," Susie Coston, national shelter director for Farm Sanctuary, wrote. She was already rescuing two other very sick calves that day, who had come in with scores of others from massive dairy farms in Pennsylvania and New York. The calves who show up at the stockyard are often just a day or two old.

"Calves often arrive at the stockyard too weak to stand, dehydrated and without having received vital colostrum from their mothers," Coston explained. "This leaves them vulnerable to infection and disease, which quickly sets in." It seemed like the scrawny calf hardly stood a chance.